Plate Presentation – Four Tips for Making Your Food Look Amazing

Whether you’re catering to friends and family of you have somebody super important coming to your home, you want your food to look as impressive as possible.

It’s all down to the plate presentation.

The same steak could look amazing on one plate and like a dog’s dinner on another.

How do you make your food look amazing?

Here are a few tips that can help you.

Tip #1 – Pay Attention to Plate Colours

The key with plate selection is to play around with colours and contrast.

For example, food that features lots of bold colours looks best when contrasted against a plain and light background. Patterned cutlery clashes with the food and makes it look messy.

Darker coloured plates come into play when you’re serving light-coloured foods. Such foods have the potential to look pretty plain when set against a light background. Introducing a little colour with your crockery can make a big difference.

Then we come to patterned plates. They’re a risk but you could pull it off with muted patterns. Again though, make sure your checking to create contrast with the food.

Tip #2 – Start From the Inside Out

You want to control how the food fits on the plate. That means no sliding things off the baking tray. Instead, each individual food item has to be picked up and placed.

Positioning is key here.

Start from the centre of the plate and work your way out. Decide on the piece of food that will act almost as a centrepiece before designing the rest of the dish around it.

It’s all about the control. If you just dump everything on the plate and let food fall wherever it wants, you end up with a sloppy plate.

Tip #3 – Don’t Stack the Plate

Yes, we all love to overindulge every once in a while.

But when you’re serving food, a stacked plate usually isn’t the way to go. Unless you’re specifically trying to challenge somebody with the amount of food on the plate, it’s better to keep things a little more subdued.

Put it like this.

The less you stack the plate, the more space you have to get creative. That means you can use garnishes and sauces to add some little design flourishes.

That’s not possible if you’re piled everything into a heap.

Tip #4 – Don’t Take it Too Seriously

Inject a little bit of joy into your plate presentation. Experiment with different garnishes and shapes. Try fitting foods together in different ways.

Make your plate presentation part of the whole cooking experience.

Yes, some of your experiments might not come off as you expected them too. But if you’re enjoying playing around with ideas, you’re injecting that intangible passion into the meal that comes straight from the heart.

Of course, you can’t present a plate without having food to put on it.